Meet Lisa Kellar Gianakos , Director of Knowledge Management at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman
As Director of Knowledge Management at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, Lisa Kellar Gianakos is responsible for ensuring that the marketing department and the partners have all the information they need to be successful in attracting new clients - and that they can find the information when they need it, where they need it.
At Pillsbury, the firm that Gianakos joined a little more than a year ago, she is responsible for marketing technology and for the firm's extranets, intranet and enterprise search. About 16 people report to her, including Web developers and marketing technology staff. She reports to the firm's chief information officer.
In 2010, the firm launched an intranet using Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 technology and Recommind's Decisiv Search that includes the relatively new concept of "experience search." Going a step beyond an experience database, this tool permits anyone in the marketing department to identify any lawyer in the firm who has experience in a particular industry or type of case, to see what the past matters were including descriptions of work performed, and to find the documents that that lawyer generated. The system ranks the past experiences in order of relevance to the key words or phrases.
Gianakos is primarily responsible for this project, which she says is intended to put invaluable information in the hands of the marketing department that can give Pillsbury an edge in an RFP.
"We are always trying to make this better by putting additional information sources into it. It will continue to evolve and improve over time," says Gianakos.
Gianakos came to Pillsbury from the knowledge management director position at Reed Smith. Before that, she was a senior practice consultant at Hunton & Williams, and before that, she was director of knowledge management and IT manager at what was then LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae.
Gianakos has written extensively on legal knowledge management and IT issues for Thomson Elite, a division of Thomson Reuters. In 2010, for example, she wrote an article in Practice Innovations, a Thomson Elite publication, about alternative fees. Among the pieces of advice she gave for law firms to make alternative fees profitable were to "make greater investments in procedures to better capture knowledge so it can be reused; for instance, develop checklists for all major matter types or create more or better precedent collections" and "invest in new systems such as experience location tools/search to get people in touch with others faster and with greater accuracy."
Gianakos has been extensively involved in technology organizations such is the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) and the annual LegalTech conference. She is also a member of the editorial board and a contributing author for Practice Innovations.
She will be a panelist at the 2012 LMA Annual Conference next month, focusing on "practical examples of the cutting-edge technologies firms are using to increase knowledge-sharing, and to offer online legal services to their clients" and "how marketing professionals can best use knowledge management efforts to demonstrate their firms' unique value proposition."
Gianakos has a bachelor's degree in communications from Ithaca College and a master's degree in information systems from American University. She is also a certified Novell network engineer.
Gianakos, her husband, and their daughters (age 7 and 5) live in Takoma Park, Md. In her spare time, she enjoys reading fiction, ice skating, and Jazzercise.
Profile written by Jonathan Groner, a Washington, DC legal marketing consultant